Taylor suspends defence minister for insubordination

President Charles Taylor of Liberia has suspended his minister of defence and longtime ally, Maj -Gen Daniel Chea, for insubordination and placed him under house arrest amid mounting tension over military activity on the country’s border with Guinea. Chea, who was trained in the United States, was suspended indefinitely over “an administrative assignment that was not carried out”, Information Minister Joe Mulbah told IRIN on Tuesday. Chea’s house in Monrovia is being guarded by members of the Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU), which is under the command of the executive mansion. “The president has a right, instead of sending him to the central prison, to keep him under arrest in his own home,” Mulbah told IRIN. If the suspension goes deeper than an administrative matter, analysts in Monrovia said, it could signal a growing rift within the country’s military. Chea had just returned from Liberia’s northern county of Lofa, where troops have been fighting back a reported armed incursion from dissidents allegedly based in Guinea. Mulbah said Chea’s suspension “had nothing to do with the fighting”. Meanwhile Guinea claimed on Monday that armed men based in Liberia attacked the village of Massadou, 25 km inside the country’s border, killing a number of people, including at least two Guinean soldiers. Radio Guinee reported that the attackers burned homes and stole goods that they forced local residents to carry back into the bush for them. Among the residents of Massadou were Liberian refugees who had fled fighting in Lofa. Lofa is being defended mainly by the ATU, which is largely comprised of soldiers who were children or teenagers fighting for Taylor when he was a rebel leader in the early 1990s. The Armed Forces of Liberia has been under the control of Chea and is poorly trained and equipped. In August, Taylor suspended army commander General John Tarnue for reportedly giving misleading accounts of the fighting in Lofa - namely playing down the gravity of the situation. He faced a board of inquiry, was cleared and reinstated. Some of Taylor’s detractors have accused him of fabricating the story of war in Lofa to hide his alleged involvement in diamonds and arms smuggling in neighbouring Sierra Leone, and to stir up nationalist sentiment at a time when he feels pressured by the international community. Britain and the United States have threatened to impose sanctions on Liberia, accusing Taylor of trading in diamonds and arms with Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front, and thus helping to prolong the insecurity in the neighbouring country. Eleven British soldiers were abducted last week in Sierra Leone. Five have been released.